Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

30. Some Texas Confederates

✥ 30 ✥ Some Texas Confederates The civil war is a watershed event in American history, one that still resonates with us. My generation is the last generation that will have known people who knew people who fought in it. I come from a Southern family. Three of my four great-grandfathers were in the Confederate army and the fourth was on his way from Texas to Virginia at the age of thirteen to join up when he met his brothers on the road coming back. They told him Lee had surrendered and it was all over. I absorbed a lot of Civil War lore from my father, who, as a boy, liked to hang around Confederate veterans and listen to their stories. He knew both of his Confederate grandfathers. His grandfather Border grew up in Ohio but had Southern sympathies, and when the war started he crossed the Ohio River and enlisted as a private in John Hunt Morgan’s Second Kentucky Cavalry. He was on Morgan’s thousand-mile long cavalry raid through Indiana and Ohio and ended the war, still a private, as part of the cavalry escort that was with Jefferson Davis when he was captured in Georgia. His grandfather Taylor held a higher rank but had a less adventurous war. He was a captain on the staff of General John Bankhead Magruder (known as “Prince John” for his elegant manners and extravagant uniforms) in Galveston, but he got crosswise with Magruder over the general’s dealings on the cotton market and was sent into exile as a recruiting officer in his hometown of McKinney, Texas, where for the rest of his life he was Captain Taylor. Most Texans had a Civil War experience far closer to Captain 116 ✥ Taylor’s than to Private Border’s. About one hundred thousand Texas men and boys joined the Confederate Army, but two-thirds of them never left the Southwest. They spent the war guarding the borders of Texas against Indians and Yankees or participating in the expansionist schemes of the Confederacy into New Mexico. The ones who did get to the East gave a good account of themselves. Hood’s Texas Brigade, four thousand men commanded by General John Bell Hood who lost an arm and a leg leading them, was part of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and fought in twenty-four major battles. By the end of the war the brigade had been reduced to six hundred officers and men. Terry’s Texas Rangers, a cavalry brigade raised in Fort Bend and Wharton counties , was on its way to Virginia when it was diverted to Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. Bragg used them as shock troops and they fought with distinction at Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, and in the Atlanta Campaign. Texas contributed one distinguished general and a number of not-so-distinguished ones to the Confederate Army. John Bell Hood was actually born in Kentucky, but he was serving in Texas with the Second United States Cavalry when the war started and was so disgusted with his native state’s failure to leave the Union that he declared himself a Texan. Hood was a natural leader. He stood six feet two and was rawboned and narrow faced, with hair and a beard that was such a light brown that it was almost yellow. His men loved him and would follow him anywhere. He was at his best in battle; he instinctively knew where to direct his blows. Stephen Vincent Benet described him as “all lion, none of the fox.” There is a monument to him and his brigade on the state capitol grounds. War brings fools and hotheads as well as heroes to the fore, and Texas had its share of those, too. Louis T. Wigfall was a combative state legislator from Marshall who got himself elected to the US Senate in 1859 on a proslavery, anti-abolitionist ticket. After ✥ 117 Lincoln’s election Wigfall used the Senate floor to urge the slave states to secede, and when Fort Sumter was fired upon he took it upon himself to row out to the fort in a rowboat, wearing civilian clothes but waving a sword, and demand its surrender. The Union officer who pulled him through the casemate found him an astonishing figure. When it came to actual fighting, Wigfall preferred to be elsewhere. After a brief stint as an officer in Hood...